Re: Review of Vinge's Deepness in the Sky

[This thread is from a month ago, but I just finished reading the book so
I'm following it up now.]

On Tue, Mar 2, 1999 at 9:30:51PM +0000, Robin Hanson wrote:
>I find the idea of exploring a "depressingly limited future" very>interesting and relevant. If one could paint a detailed enough >picture of just how things could be so limiting, that could help >us better evaluate our chances of being slowed down by such limits, >and perhaps help us avoid such scenarios. >>So does Vinge present a plausible detailed picture? I'm not sure.>Limits to software complexity were plausibly presented, and so I >could buy the lack of AI or advanced automation. Though the story>doesn't say so, I suppose complexity limits could also explain the>life extension limits described. The failure to make substantial >progress in physics seemed more arbitrary, though I suppose very >subtle effects might remain hidden for millennia until the right >clues were presented. >>More puzzling was the failure to achieve anything like nanotech. >I suppose complexity limits could be behind this. In one case, >a system with "a technology as high as Humankind ever attained" >achieved something close to nanotech, and the dust our hero >bought from them became a core element of all trader's starships, >and the key to our hero's power. But I don't recall that system >being noted for any other abilities to handle complexity. (It >was particularly bad at life extension.) >>Perhaps most puzzling is the failure to use any significant >fraction of the resources at each solar system. Human populations>around a star are never more than "billions", and we see nothing >like wholesale conversion of asteroids and comets. "Sooner or later >[each system] ossified and politics carried it into a fall."

>The frustrating thing about using science fiction to think>about these issues is not knowing whether the author thought>they had good reasons to expect things described, whether they>were just choices to make the story easier to tell, or whether>the author just didn't even notice them. I suspect one big >problem is that Vinge doesn't really believe in these limits.

He might not believe these limits, but I don't think he rules them out
completely either.